A week before prime-ministerial elections that seem certain to bring hardliner Mr Ariel Sharon to power in Israel, Mr Ehud Barak and Mr Yasser Arafat have now clearly given up on each other and on the peace process to which they both still insist they are committed.
With his blistering attack on the Barak government at the World Economic Forum in Davos last Wednesday, Mr Arafat, President of the Palestinian Authority, essentially signalled that he had read the writing on the Israeli political wall, knew that Mr Barak was serving out his final days as Prime Minister, and felt no need for restraint.
"The current government of Israel," he declared, "has been waging a savage and barbaric war . . . a blatant and fascist military aggression against our Palestinian people."
Mr Shimon Peres, the senior Barak Minister who was appearing with Mr Arafat, said he had come "prepared for a wedding, not a divorce". But divorce is what the speech most definitely represented. In its immediate wake came a notice from Mr Barak's office that he would not, as he had tentatively planned, now be travelling to Sweden for a final pre-election meeting with the Palestinian leader.
From Mr Arafat's point of view, Mr Barak's 20 months in government have been an unmitigated disaster, with not a single metre of West Bank territory handed over to Palestinian control, no change in the settlement-expansion policies of the previous Netanyahu government and what he called in Davos "a dangerous military escalation" in the four months since the Intifada erupted.
Asked last night in a rare Israeli television interview how he regarded the prospect of an election victory next Tuesday by Mr Sharon, who has vowed to block any further land handovers to the Palestinians, Mr Arafat professed himself unconcerned. When last their paths crossed, at the Wye River talks in the US in 1998 - Mr Sharon was serving as Mr Benjamin Netanyahu's foreign minister - Mr Sharon presented "complete other plans", Mr Arafat asserted.
From Mr Barak's point of view, the disappointment has been equally acute. He pinned all his hopes on achieving a treaty with the Palestinians, offered them what he felt was as much territory as Israel dare concede and believes that Mr Arafat deliberately resorted to violence rather than forge an accord.
Further violence in the West Bank and Gaza yesterday merely confirmed the failed partnership. Israeli troops killed a Palestinian in Gaza and a West Bank settler was shot dead last night from a passing car north of Jerusalem.
Mr Hisham Abdel Razak, a senior Palestinian official, insisted yesterday that "we don't care" who wins the Israeli election. Egypt's President, Mr Hosni Mubarak, for one, clearly does. He said last night that he had formed a working relationship with Mr Barak, but had no such relationship with Mr Sharon and no interest in working with him "unless it was for the sake of regional stability".
But he stressed that he had every desire to avoid a new Middle East war, and urged Mr Sharon's potential coalition partners to stop publicly talking of regional confrontation.
While Mr Sharon has distanced himself from such comments, he is nevertheless derisive of the concessions Mr Barak has been offering. At a meeting yesterday with residents of the Golan Heights, he reaffirmed that he would not dismantle a single Jewish settlement.